Managing IMAP

EMU 3

We were initially romanced by the jogging emu (his movements are so realistic, you almost expect him to squawk).^[15]

Overview

The version we evaluated was a prerelease version. The demo of the latest version of EMU 3 is available at http://www.emumail.com/download.html.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

EMU 3 comes in a free version, if you don’t mind banner advertisements. Some of EMU’s strong points include:

• Messages may be postponed while in progress. The postponed message is preserved between sessions, allowing the user to resume composing the message later.

• Client-side mail filtering using user-defined filtering rules.

• Full message header display can be toggled on and off.

EMU documentation is included with the distribution. Appendix B, Adding SSL Support to IMAP , of the installation guide contains very useful troubleshooting information. The interface is very neatly done. The menu bars at the top and bottom of message index have clearly labeled buttons.

Weaknesses

The free version has banner advertisements that cannot be removed.

It’s not open source.

IMAP flags are not handled 100% correctly; for example, messages flagged “\\Answered,” don’t show up in EMU 3 as answered messages.

There is some difficulty creating folders on a remote IMAP server. The client accepts the input and returns with no errors, but the folder is not created. This may require configuration tuning, but there’s no documentation at this point.

Performance when loading a mailbox is noticeably slower ...